Bridges for Those Left Behind

The Baltimore Ethical Society will be hosting a reception on Saturday, February 3, from 6:00 p.m. to 8:00 p.m. to support the work of BES member and artist Kimberly Sheridan who paints portraits of Baltimore gun violence victims. The event will be in conjunction with the Baltimore Ceasefire weekend. We will be displaying some of her work and have some light refreshments.

Kimberly describes her project, The Million Gun Victims March, as “one artist’s quest to discover the truth behind who we lose to guns in the US every year, one painted portrait at a time.” She started her project, in April 2013, in response to Congress’s failure to respond to the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School. Sheridan channeled her anger into a 20-hour flurry of work using her weapons of choice, brushes and oil paint. The result was a portrait of James Smith III, a three-year-old shot in the head while getting his first haircut at a Baltimore barbershop in 1997.

Since then she has painted 137 portraits to put faces to the statistics behind gun violence. The focus of Saturday’s reception will be portraits of people killed in domestic violence.

The Ethical Society hopes to support two of her goals. The first is “bringing the paintings home to the families”, by donating the portraits to the families of victims. The second is having a permanent space for prints of the portraits to become a memorial for the victims.

Baltimore Ethical Society

The Baltimore Ethical Society is a humanist congregation. We focus on human lives and relationships and explore what it means to live ethically as individuals, family members, and participants in the larger community. We have no creeds and no doctrines, but we are united by our belief in the worth and dignity of each individual and our commitment to working together to create a more just, humane, and peaceful world.